Opinion

Melbourne should be ashamed it took so long to accept Jacinta and Sami

In Melbourne, we flatter ourselves as being down with diversity, up with inclusion, open to change and, to quote the ex PM, culturally "agile".

We are the home of deconstructed coffee and the DIY avo toast (at $16 a pop), a place where no one bats an eyelid about having to pop down the shops for some tamarind to make tonight's tea.

ABC breakfast hosts Sami Shah and Jacinta Parsons have been accepted...but not before time.Credit:Andrew Wuttke

We spruik ourselves not only as the country's great multi-cultural success story but as boasting such spectacular cultural richness it doesn't even matter we don't have the sexy harbour.

Yet our collective response to a not-even-that-confronting change of hosts on our loved national broadcaster's breakfast show has exposed just how closed-minded many of us are.

Advertisement

Sami Shah and Jacinta Parsons, both of whom I have met briefly, should have been welcomed with open arms by an audience which has long complained there is not enough variety in the kind of person given a full-time show on the ABC.

Loading

Sure, Sami has an accent (which gives his jokes a special extra something, if you ask me), and Jacinta came from a "music station", and they both replaced the city's most adorable professional grump. (At this point, let me add my voice to the millions feeling heartsore for Red Symons after the terribly sad death of his son, Samuel this week.)

Symons had his brand, and it was popular, like the station's other established time-slot hosts, Jon Faine, Raf Epstein and Lindy Burns; we were used to him, we saw him as a fixture and a "friend", the pinnacle achievement of any talk radio host.

But renewal is healthy, 15 years of having one person do one job is a long time even in a field where change is often considered a last resort, rather than a necessary part of healthy renewal (like it is across other organisations).

As each ratings survey came in this year, and each, until now, showed Melbourne still stubbornly refused to give Sami and Jacinta a fair hearing – even after their show was acknowledged by experienced critics to have improved a heap and be humming along with good banter and interesting ideas – there has been a shameful sense of glee in some quarters about the pair's failure to cut through.

Loading

This resistance to even giving a chance to a woman with a different, and warm, radio voice and a brown man was perhaps understandable, a bit, at first. Parsons is more contemporary-sounding than the rest, and as mentioned, Shah doesn't sound like "one of us"...if by "us" we mean like every other man on commercial and ABC radio.

Listeners to ABC radio are famously "rusted on" to popular presenters, so they/we can be cut some slack, I guess, for being cross about something unexpected happening.

But there has seemed to be something deeper and, dare I say, uglier at play in the way this pair has been received; watching them struggle seemed to bleed into something of a media spectator sport.

Melbourne, face it, you should be a bit ashamed of the way you have locked these people with something fresh to add, something new to talk about, something different to offer, out.

Now they have begun to "claw back" some ratings, and good for them, why not give 'em a proper chance.

Wendy Tuohy has made occasional appearances on ABC local radio and 3AW.